"Cynical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the loss more than was to be expected from the hardness and severity of his character. In truth, his misfortunes had now cut to the quick. The mocker, the tyrant, the most rigorous, the most imperious, the most cynical of men, was very unhappy. His face was so haggard, and his form so thin, that when on his return from Bohemia he passed through Leipsic, the people hardly knew him again. His sleep was broken; the tears, in spite of himself, often started into his eyes; and the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... legislative enactments have very much influence on the prevalence of homosexuality. The chief effect seems to be that the attempt at suppression arouses the finer minds among sexual inverts to undertake the enthusiastic defense of homosexuality, while coarser minds are stimulated to cynical bravado.[273] ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... some cynical objector, "flowers are only to please the eye." And why should not the eye be pleased? What sense may be more innocently gratified? They are among the most simple and cheapest luxuries in which we ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... hero in the Asiatic country of his birth; the second, his reincarnation in Greece and Rome; the third, his reincarnation in the Middle Ages and in modern times. All this pleased him very much, and he thought, it might come to something. Not so my cynical friend, Dr. Wille, who had an estate in the country where we often met in the bosom of his family. He was of opinion that we expected far too much of Herwegh. Viewed at close quarters he was, after all, only a young Swabian who had received a far larger share of honour and glory than his abilities ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... acting all the time I've been here. Do you think I didn't see it was unreal, when you talked with such cynical indifference? I know you well enough to tell when you're hiding your real ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... not understand?" suggested the man. The cynical humor in his face had no resemblance to mirth. "They ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the town and port of Suakin might afford a useful instance to a cynical politician. Most of the houses stand on a small barren island which is connected with the mainland by a narrow causeway. At a distance the tall buildings of white coral, often five storeys high, ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... pen, he wrote stories about sea-wolves and star-gazers: he wallowed in the details of bloody combat. If he was aware of the density of human life, of the drama of the conflict of its planes, he used his knowledge only as a measure of avoidance. He claimed to have found truth in a complete cynical dissolution. 'But I know better,' he says, 'than to give this truth as I have seen it, in my books. The bubbles of illusion, the pap of pretty lies are the true ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... mountains thrill and glow Beneath our Lady Folly's tread? Why has she left us, wise in woe, Shrewd, practical, uncomforted? We cannot love or dream or sing, We are too cynical to pray, There is no joy in anything ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... that her father, though of an abrupt and cynical temper, was not a man naturally of a bad or unfeeling heart. Whatever mood of temper chanced to be uppermost influenced him for the time; and indeed it might be said that one half of his feelings were usually in a state of conflict with the other. In matters of business he was ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of affectionate good-will that enables mature men, after rough and disillusioning experiences in public life, to maintain without sentimentality a genuine and persistent interest in the welfare of others. Those in whom the fund of human kindness is slender will, and easily do, become cynical and hard. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... enterprise is believed by them to operate as a counterpoise for a multitude of sins, whether past or future, and perhaps they exert themselves in after life to restore the balance of good and evil. The Turks have a maxim which, like most cynical apophthegms, carries with it the buzzing trumpet of falsehood as well as the small, fine “sting of truth.” “If your friend has made the pilgrimage once, distrust him; if he has made the pilgrimage twice, cut him dead!” The caution is said to be as applicable ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... look like a hermit. A man yet young, erect, well-dressed, clean-shaven, with a low voice, and a smile half melancholy, half cynical, was scarcely the conventional idea of a solitary. His dwelling, a rude improvement on a fisherman's cabin, had all the severe exterior simplicity of frontier architecture, but within it was comfortable and wholesome. Three rooms—a kitchen, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... disgracefully impudent as they danced with her or went through the figures of a cotillion, as if they considered her an easy conquest, seeing her married to an artist who could not display an ugly uniform in the drawing rooms. They made cynical declarations to her in English or German and she had to keep her temper, smiling and biting her lips, close to Renovales, who did not understand a word and showed his satisfaction at the attentions of which his wife was the object on the part of the fashionable youths ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... These cynical proceedings were trifling compared to the vexations which the Donatists daily inflicted on their opponents. Not only did they tamper with Augustin's people, but the country dwellers of the Catholic Church were continually interfered with on their lands, pillaged, ravaged, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... go to the confessional one Good Friday, he carved a figure of the Christ from a stick of wood. The impiety evidenced by that figure was too flagrant not to draw down chastisement on the artist. He had actually had the hardihood to place that decidedly cynical image on the top of ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... A cynical smile curled the lip of the President, and he glanced at the jury as though asking them to pay ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... beginning from the worst systems of philosophy ascends to those which are relatively correct. This account contains most of what we know about their doctrines,[792] but is obviously biassed: it represents them as cynical voluptuaries holding that the only end of man is sensual enjoyment. We are told that they admitted only one source of knowledge, namely perception, and four elements, earth, water, fire and air, and that they held the soul to be identical with the body. Such a phrase as my body they ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... which should bind All things anew in one, Newton arose And carried on their fire. Around him reeled Through lingering fumes of hate and clouds of doubt, Lit by the afterglow of the Civil War, The dissolute throngs of that Walpurgis night Where all the cynical spirits that deny Danced with the vicious lusts that drown the soul In flesh too gross for Circe or her swine. But, in his heart, he heard one instant voice. "On with the torch once more, make all things new, Build the new heaven and earth, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... before the world in all the dignity of freedom and virtue—a form which made the whole earth glad and the heavens clap their hands in exultation. What giant leaps the nation made in manhood and heroism, strides following each other thick and fast, until the most cynical of the doubters of humanity began to open their eyes, and acknowledge that they would not have thought her capable of such unexampled deeds. The national heroism which the Northern people have displayed is ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... sort of thing often?' asked Ida, with rather a cynical air. 'You talk as if it were a common experience ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... England and France, nobles and knights and ladies, met on the famous "field of the Cloth of Gold". Jousts and feastings were the order of the day. Wolsey understood how to impress the popular imagination; and he had a magnificent scorn or a cynical contempt for the enmities and jealousies aroused, of which he himself, as responsible for all the arrangements, became the centre. It may be doubted, however, whether any great goodwill between the two nations was born of all the display ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Carroll suffered from the undiscerning critics who persisted in seeing in their nonsense a hidden meaning, a cynical, political, or other intent, veiled under the apparent foolery. Lear takes occasion to deny this in the preface to one of his books, and asserts not only that his rhymes and pictures have no symbolical meaning, but that he "took more care than might be supposed ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... frock-coat and striped waistcoat.... I can hear his unpleasantly jarring laugh.... He went everywhere, was conspicuous at all possible kinds of 'dancing classes.' ... I remember I could not listen to his cynical stories without a peculiar shudder.... Kolosov once compared him to an unswept Russian refreshment bar ... a horrible comparison! And with all that, there was a lot of intelligence, common sense, observation, and wit in the man.... He sometimes impressed ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the wanderer; his heart softened, and for a time he laid aside his cynical, discontented manner. The well-furnished rooms, the handsome arrangements of the supper-table, and the servants in attendance, all spoke of ample means. A feeling of jealousy might possibly have passed through his ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... away the impression of the fiery speaker, Grundtvig, nevertheless, retained at least two lasting memories from the lectures—the power of the spoken word, a power that even against his will could arouse him from his cynical indifference, and the reverence with which Steffens spoke of Christ as "the center of history." The human race, he contended, had sunk progressively lower and lower from the fall of man until the time of Nero, when the process had been reversed and man ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... Quantock, he would probably be taking away the brandy bottle for himself. But Georgie knew he was only too apt to indulge In secret cynicisms and perhaps there was no brandy to take away by this time ... and lo and behold, he was being cynical again. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... the Axis powers is based on a profound contempt for the human race. If, in the formation of our future policy, we were guided by the same cynical contempt, then we should be surrendering to the philosophy of our enemies, and our victory would turn ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... broad day again, waking to find Jack Travers standing by my bed, pale and cynical, dusting off the ashes from the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... which other girls can do, and which God never intended she also should do—if she is spending her time reading books which can never be of any possible good to her—if she is becoming fault-finding, cynical, cross, selfish—if she is doing any of these things which keep her from being what she ought to be—her everyday life needs trimming! Think it over. If you find any useless, strength-absorbing thing in your life, ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... looked spiteful enough; but he soon recovered his cynical egotism, and went off whistling an ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... shoulders. "You're quite a change. It's generally the other way round. Men ask me for money, and I do the refusing." Usually, his expression was hard, almost cynical, but as he looked at Jimmy it softened, and he seemed to grow years younger. He was back again on the China Coast, in the days when success was a thing of the future, and therefore greatly to be prized. "You'll do well, Grierson, you've got it in you, just as ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... of satire, had in it two or three men of real gift. Forbes himself was a man of uncommon vivacity. Small, stocky, with an unruly thatch of yellow hair and a quaintly wry and homely face, he hid his shyness and his brilliancy behind a brusque manner. Ostensibly cynical and a witty satirist of his more sentimental fellows, his desk was full of charming ballades and pieces d'amour, scratched off at white heat in odd moments. His infinite fund of full-flavoured jest had won him the nickname of Priapus. But beneath the uncouth ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... had told him a week ago that he would be in so strange a world he would have quarrelled violently with his informant. A week ago he was a cynical clear-sighted modern, a contemner of illusions, a swallower of formulas, a breaker of shams—one who had seen through the heroical and found it silly. Romance and such-like toys were playthings for fatted middle-age, not for strenuous and cold-eyed youth. But the truth was that ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... magnified threefold by the tongue of common report. He was received with open arms everywhere, and lived in a perfect atmosphere of flattery. Not being able to shine by means of cultivation or polish, he sought to gain a position in his club by a certain roughness of demeanor and a cynical mode of speech. He flung away his money in every direction, kept racers, and was uniformly fortunate in his betting transactions. He frequented the world of gallantry, and was constantly to be seen in the company of women whose reputations ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... fight was renewed with added fierceness. Her heart yearned over Thorne, her love rose up and upbraided her for hardness. He was so changed, he had suffered so, his hair was growing gray, hard lines were deepening about his mouth, and to his eyes had come an expression that wrung her heart—a cynical hopelessness, a sullen gloom. Was this her work? Was she shutting out hope from a life, thus making a screen of a scruple to keep ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... circumstances, that remark, as Charteris was at some pains to explain to him at the time, contained—when you came to analyse it—more cynical immorality to the cubic foot than any other half-dozen remarks he (Charteris) had ever ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense, becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse phases. In Mary Magdalen he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... did the Propositions treat the cause of Presbyterial government in England and of conformity of Church-rule in the two kingdoms? Most miserably! No pressing of Presbytery to full purity and completeness, but rather a cynical acquiescence in the imperfect Presbytery that had already been set up, and a glee in not being committed even to that beyond three years! Finally, even this Presbytery was turned into a present mockery by an accompanying concession to the cry for Liberty of Conscience! The Commissioners ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... words: "Can you hear me now?" The operation seems easy, in the telling, or again perhaps it appears intensely involved and hardly worth the trouble. A motto of Shirley's was: "Nothing is too much trouble if it's worth while." So, with this. To the cynical camera man its general nature was expressed in his whispered phrase to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the face of Randolph Mason from above, the expression in repose was crafty and cynical; viewed from below upward, it was savage and vindictive, almost brutal; while from the front, if looked squarely in the face, the stranger was fascinated by the animation of the man and at once concluded that his expression was fearless and sneering. He was evidently of Southern ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... in this Bag Capricornus, and in the adjacent ones on both sides thereof, it becomes manifest that our philosopher, as stoical and cynical as he now looks, was heartily and even frantically in Love: here therefore may our old doubts whether his heart were of stone or of flesh give way. He loved once; not wisely but too well. And once only: for as your Congreve needs a new case or wrappage for every ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned indifference to the truth, the English public school does not provide us with the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics to remember that right or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is working, the wheels are going ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... passion which simulates it; worshipping herself, offering luxuries to her cold flesh as to an idol; scornful of the possibility that she might ever come to lack what she desired; and, at the critical moment, prompt to secure herself against such danger by the smiling, cynical acceptance of whatsoever shame. Alma had no small gift of intuition; proved by the facility and fervour with which she could adapt her mind to widely different conceptions of life. This characteristic, aided by the perspicacity which is bestowed ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... was seated writing (seemingly very absorbed). He appeared to me to be a man of about thirty-five or forty years old, short, thick-set, with a full, round face, a bushy black beard, a sensuous mouth, and a cynical smile. He wore tortoise-shell eyeglasses; but these could not hide the wicked expression of his ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... sort of stupefaction to the cynical answers of the old scoundrel, and her heart grew heavy within her. To think that that merry, rosy cheeked young woman should have killed herself out ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... certain class of sporting snobs who endeavour to enhance their own consequence or indulge their cynical humour by talking with the utmost contempt of any variation from the kind of hunting-dress in use, in their own particular district. The best commentary on the supercilious tailoring criticism of these gents is to be found in the fact that within a century every variety of ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... melancholy and cynical country. Our literary men and poets, who ought to give us courage, have taken to writing about the Irish as people who "went forth to battle, but always fell," sentimentalizing over incompetence instead of invigorating us and liberating us and directing our energies. We have developed ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... rough and bearlike—boorish," she thought, as she remembered that the man had not removed his hat in her presence. "He called me names. He is uncouth, cynical, egotistical. He thinks he can scare me into leaving his Indians alone." Her lips trembled and tightened. "I am a woman, and I'll show him what a woman can do. He has lived among the Indians until he thinks he owns them. He is hard, and domineering, and uncompromising, and ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... was generally attributed to the influence of Bute and the court, and to a desire to injure a political opponent and gratify a powerful supporter. The feeling was strengthened by the characters of the two disputants, for Portland was a man of high reputation, Lowther a cynical tyrant. On February 17, 1768, Sir George Savile, a great Yorkshire landowner and a member of the Rockingham party, whose integrity and wealth gave him weight in the house, brought in a bill called the Nullum tempus bill, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... flung his answer on a note of laughter, bitter and cynical as the laughter of the damned, laughter that expressed all ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... He was bitter and cynical. He hardly took into account, in that hard moment, the feeling of release; all his foregone conclusions, his stern resolves, had been battered down. He had got his discharge with nothing to ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... declaring that she "had no stomach," and "could not pick a lark's bones," she finished by eating more than Clare and Blanche put together. Jack, meanwhile, was attending to his own personal wants, and took no notice of his bride, beyond a cynical remark now and then, to which Gertrude returned a sharp answer. It was evident that no love was lost ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... give to a woman who barters her youthful charms for the fortune of an aged husband? Shall we be cynical enough to agree ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... that flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding back the memory of that ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Parliament. His long tenure of power had commenced in the previous summer, and it lasted until the Premier was struck down by serious illness in the opening weeks of 1827. In Lord John's opinion, Lord Liverpool was a 'man of honest but narrow views,' and he probably would have endorsed the cynical description of him as the 'keystone rather than the capital' of his own Cabinet. Lord Castlereagh was at the Foreign Office, Lord Sidmouth was Home Secretary, Mr. Vansittart Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Palmerston Secretary at War, and Mr. Peel Secretary ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... cynical philosophy. Four hundred years after his death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains; and though he left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is only after these four hundred years ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... worn thin. For me, after a day in her roaring streets, after a scramble in her lotteries, there ever comes a recrudescence of that wonder with which I beheld my first view of her from the Jersey shore. The cynical American says, I know not with what truth, that the alien, clutching his bundle and gazing with anxious, frightened eyes toward the mountainous masonry of Manhattan, catching sight of the green sunlit image of Liberty with her benign unfaltering ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... have to eliminate the tired business-man and his fat wife and their late dinners," said a cynical friend. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... abroad; and when affection, like a desert spot, has no legitimate possessors, it is usurped by bastard children or even servants, who when they have obtained our love, make us fear for them and be anxious about them. So that one may often see men, in a cynical temper, inveighing against marriage and children, who themselves shortly afterwards will be plunged into unmanly excesses of grief, at the loss of their child by some slave or concubine. Some have even shown terrible grief at the death of dogs and horses; whereas others, who ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... largely arose from the facts that she thought England was simple, when England is very subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely financial that they had become wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become pretty cynical that they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a coronet when he would not sell a fortress; might lower the public standards and yet refuse to ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... was followed by advice; and numerous were the cautions I received, and the precautions I was recommended to take. Among those present, was a friend of mine named Thomson, who was rather given to be cynical in his remarks, and was besides addicted to the study of phrenology. He declared that for his part he was not so apprehensive concerning me on account of the pikes of the Repealers as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... that is a sign of a rich and varied nature. We must bear with patience and good nature Harry's gushing, little condescensions, for he really thinks the majority of his elders to be grossly ignorant, perverse, and cynical. Yet he really loves us in spite of our faults, so I think we must be ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of a girl and boy. The chief interest centres around Ruth, who is supposed to be the orphan child of a working-man, but who eventually turns out to be the daughter of the cynical, though essentially kind-hearted, owner of Silver Mill. In tracing the character of Ruth as she develops from an impulsive girl to noble womanhood, the author has drawn a picture at once pleasing ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... that he loves melancholy better than laughing. ''Tis good to be sad and say nothing.' He has, he says, a melancholy of his own, the result of his experience and reflection, which wraps him in a most humorous sadness. Jaques, in fact, is a rake turned cynical philosopher. He regards man and nature as only so much material for observation ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... basis For hypochondriasis A widow had forebodings which a cloud around her flung, And with expression cynical For half the day a clinical Thermometer ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... of the man, smug, cynical, shameless, sprawling luxuriously on the sofa, with his tunic unbuttoned, filled him with sudden fury: such fury as Oliver's insult had aroused, such as had impelled him during a vicious rag in the mess to clutch a man's hair and almost pull ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... have taken possession of men's minds, how they have struggled, altered, proliferated, decayed. There is nothing in this war at all but a conflict of ideas, traditions, and mental habits. The German Will clothed in conceptions of aggression and fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity of the German mind and the confused protest of mankind. So that the most permanently important thing in the tragic process of this war is the change of opinion that is ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... had no idea of the moods of nature; at any rate they never seemed to affect him. To him all water was something to drink or something to swim in, and the earth was good pasture or hard road to ride a horse over. The grasp of no agnostic was more cynical. He inquired if any of Woodford's men had crossed that day, and was answered ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... and took a place from which he could survey them at leisure. There is a bright side to everything; and that of Laing's mistake was the pleasure he derived from his delusion. Sticking his glass firmly in his eye, he watched like a cat for those playful little endearments which his cynical mood—he was, like many of us, not at his best in the morning—led him to anticipate. He watched in vain. The young people were decorum itself; more than that, they showed signs of preoccupation; they spoke only occasionally, and then with a ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... like your old cynical self again, Mr. Morris—and you are wrong. I called this morning on the agent who had the care of Francine, when I left England. When I mentioned her name, he showed me a telegram, sent to him by her father. 'There's my authority,' he said, 'for letting her leave my house.' The message was ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... names! It's like sthrokin' a cat"; and the company came aboard at five dollars a head, three polite Japanese tumblers and rope-walkers, the thoughtful dog, whose name was David, and the tin-type man, who was cynical He'd gone into tin-typing, Flannagan said, so as to express contempt and satire ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... Whether, like Renan, we look upon life in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and 'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a 'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,—in either case the world appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... flashes of greatness which from time to time broke out from the shade in which he voluntarily kept himself, that unalterable equality of temper which made him the most pleasant companion in the world, that forced and cynical gaiety, that bravery which might have been termed blind if it had not been the result of the rarest coolness—such qualities attracted more than the esteem, more than the friendship of d'Artagnan; they attracted ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... course of the events which he had planned for himself. It is an extraordinary peculiarity in unbelievers that they are often more subject to petty superstitions than other men; and similarly, it often happens that the most cynical and coldly calculating of conspirators, who believe themselves proof against all outward influences, yield to some feeling of nervous dislike for an individual who has never harmed them, and are led ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... discovery was made of a serious loss. It was spoken of in whispers at first, but gradually the whispers increased to a murmur as the loss became generally known; yet neither man nor woman quailed, and none could have told from their outward bearing the bitter struggle they were inwardly facing. A cynical traveller once said, after noting the innumerable number of statues in the land, "South America has evidently produced a phenomenal number of heroes," but we are inclined to think their tale has not been told if those who bore their trouble so bravely ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... Jack, with a faint, cynical laugh. "No go, my boy—too late. Not time now. If it had only come yesterday, I might have had a reprieve. But it didn't come. And so I have only a tremendous headache. I've less than an hour, and can't get it up in ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... he hated Christmas as we hate anything that does not agree with our temperament. Merry Christmas was nonsense to him because he did not know how to be merry. He was a cold, cynical bachelor, and at that, so far, was perfectly within the law, moral ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... mother-love watches over even the renegades from the home circle, and Mrs. Lawrence persuaded Brother John that Herbert's health was failing and that he sorely needed change and rest and coddling. The brother growled out something cynical about Chicago as a winter resort, but told her to go ahead. The party left in early February, and about the last thing before going Allison had another conference with Elmendorf. The latter had received warning that, unless he gave more time to the instruction of ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... M. Batifol's school—the grotesque and miserable teachers, the ferocious and cynical pupils, the dingy, dusty, and ink-stained rooms—saddened and displeased Amedee. Although very intelligent, he was disgusted with the sort of instruction there, which was served out in portions, like soldier's rations, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... face in a few seconds. The man was unchanged. The boy alone was altered. Rochester's hair was a little grayer, perhaps, but his face was still smooth. His out-of-door life and that wonderful mouth of his, with its half humorous, half cynical curve, still kept his face young. To the boy had come a change much more marked and evident. He was a boy no longer—not even a youth. He carried himself with the assured bearing of a man of the world. His thick black hair was carefully parted. His ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as cynical as might have been expected from a woman of Ayesha's age and experience, jarred upon me, and I answered, testily, that in our heaven there was no marriage or ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... passes for West Florida be fairly included in the territory ceded to us by France." Before leaving Paris on this mission, Monroe made an effort to secure the good offices of the Emperor, but he found Talleyrand cold and cynical as ever. He was given to understand that it was all a question of money; if the United States were willing to pay the price, the Emperor could doubtless have the negotiations transferred to Paris and put the deal through. A loan of seventy million livres ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... are so, what ought to be the attitude of educated girls and women towards pleasures, the usual pleasures of society? Certainly not the cynical one—"Life would be tolerable if it were not for its pleasures." Pleasures do make up, and ought to make up, a considerable portion of life. Now I have no time for an essay on pleasures. I will only ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... of sickly resignation. "Let's see," he said; "yes, you're right, they've got uniforms, too. It's all up. We might have had sense enough to know. I bet they traced us all the way through Alsace. There's no use trying to beat that crowd," he added in cynical despair. ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... I saw it. And yet to-day I ask myself, in a cynical way, Was it only a part you had learned to play, To see me ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised elements of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash her transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and Dickens. And he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the great Ottima and Sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality, the magnificence ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... those cynical railings, Just write me one exquisite line To say you'll look over my failings, And promise me you will be mine. And though I'm aware it's the merest Small matter of detail, to clear The ground, I may mention, my dearest, I've ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... Plutarch in describing this rout makes the same rather cynical comment. Dio puts the total loss on ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... rising before him the prospect of a peerage, due either for his extraordinary discoveries and inventions in our use of steel, or easily purchasable out of his immense wealth. What is the good of a peerage if it ends with your life? He was not without his vanities, though one of the most cynical ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... spoiled the evening for at least two of the company. Pearson left early. Captain Elisha excused himself soon after and went to his room, leaving the Dunns to chat with Caroline for an hour or more. Malcolm joked and was languid and cynical. His mother asked ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... be hoped,' said Mankelow airily. 'She seemed to me a rather reckless sort of young person. It's highly probable she will write letters which release every one but herself from responsibility. In fact'—he gazed at her with a cynical smile—'my knowledge of human nature disposes me to assure you that she certainly will. She might even, I should say, write a letter to you—perhaps a cheeky sort of letter, which would at once set your mind ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... strength to walk, away from any road or water-hole, a great thirst would come, and then delirium, perhaps bringing visions of cool running water and green trees. He would hurry toward these madly until he stumbled and fell and died. Then would come those cynical scavengers of the desert, the vulture wheeling lower, the coyote skulking nearer, pausing suspiciously to sniff and to see if he moved. Then a few poor bones, half-buried by the restless sand, would be left to whiten and crumble into particles of the same desert ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... barbarous, horribly vindictive and degrading method of serving the interests of the sublimest thing known to man, namely, justice. Wanton warfare, merely for the sake of fighting or killing, or openly avowed oppression, can scarcely be acknowledged now even by the most cynical of statesmen. The public conscience is become too sensitive for that, so that some question of justice, or the semblance of it, must be invoked in order to justify its unspeakable barbarities. But what an outrage, the deliberate ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the Bunch, had promised to come down, later. Chief of Police, Bill Hobard, was there, looking grim, as if he was half glad and half sorry to lose this passel of law-abiding but worrisome young eccentrics. There were various cynical and curious loafers around, too. There were Chippie Potter and his mutt—a more wistful and worshipping pair would have been hard ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... noticing Grant's half cynical superiority, "but you'll oblige me if you won't tell it again IN THAT WAY. There are men here mean enough to make the worst of it. It's nothing to me, of course, but my family—the girls, you know—are ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... no one knows so little of his fellow-men, as the cynical, misanthropic man, who walks in darkness, because he hates his brother. Be sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts himself in his neighbours' place; feels with them and for them; sees with ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... The real man she had never seen. What was he thinking about? What grim secret lay behind the mysterious smile that flickered about the corners of those eyes? He was not thinking of her. The mood was new and cold and cynical, for all the laughter he might put ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... going to attack any of them with cynical asperity, or with the ambition to establish any new dogmatical tenets in the place of old received opinions. It can, however, do no harm to discuss this important subject with proper reverence and humility. Without alarming ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... had been a great social success; he had introduced an absolutely foreign element into the Bush party. His pose of the cynical, dashing, amiable aristocrat, with a cheerful contempt for all aristocratic pretensions, was admirably sustained. His ready good-fellowship pleased the men; his good looks, his facility in adopting a deep interest in his companion for the ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... little aback by her answer. It sounded as though she wished to end the conversation. But her talk had stirred him strongly, though he tried to hide this under cover of a cynical tone. He said triumphantly: "But you see, after all, you admit that one is not altogether hopeless because he happens to come of a ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... same somewhat doubting position. If he requited David's kindness thus unworthily, is it not the too common experience that one way of making enemies is to load with benefits? But no cynical wisdom of that sort should interfere with our showing mercy; and if we are to take 'the kindness of God' for our pattern, we must let our sunshine and rain fall, as His do, on ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that which is satirical in Petronius is so only because we are setting up in our minds a comparison between the doings of his rich freedmen and the requirements of good taste and moderation. But it seems possible to detect a satirical or a cynical purpose on the part of the author carried farther than is involved in the choice of his subject and the realistic presentation of his characters. Petronius seems to delight in putting his most admirable sentiments in the ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... two could not be in the same room without quarrelling. It was only with care that (as the Jesuit had coldly observed) they could exist in the same world without clashing. Never was the Vicomte d'Audierne so cynical, so sceptical, as in the presence of his brother. Never was Raoul d'Audierne so cold, so heartless, so Jesuitical, as ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... think you are the most absolutely brutal, cynical creature I ever met!" There was anger in the voice, now, and something more—something which Clare could ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... rejoinder, feeling confident that he had merely asked the question to tantalise me. But seeing that he really meant what he said I rattled off a complete menu, not forgetting the cup of black coffee and an Egyptian cigarette. Feeling that the officer was in reality the prison doctor I grew reckless and cynical. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... cynical temper of Frederick the Great is well known. Once when his sister, the Duchess of Brunswick, was at Potsdam, Frederick made to the brave Count Schwerin the present of a gold snuff-box. On the lid inside was painted the head of an ass. Next day, when dining with the king, Schwerin, with ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the governor's secretary, who had ridden back. The other, with whom he was talking in low tones, and with an air of authority, was a man of my own age, dressed in the shabby remains of rich clothes. His face showed the marks of dissipation, and had a cynical, daredevil look. Now and then a sarcastic smile broke suddenly over the handsome ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens |
